


Look Homeward, Angel

by bluebeholder



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Absent Castiel, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dean Dies, Family, Gen, Heavy Angst, Man of Letters Sam, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Canonical Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sam-Centric, Wear Your Shipping Goggles If You Want, bunker family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-16 05:13:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 12,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5815558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set immediately after the end of Season 8. The angels never fell and the Gates of Hell are closed. Sam survived the Trials, but only because Dean pulled a last-minute soul swap. When Sam should have died, Dean did instead. In the wake of all this, Castiel disappears.</p><p>Sam spends the next twenty years looking for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I SWEAR THAT THIS THING WILL ACTUALLY HAVE REGULAR UPDATES. (Every Monday, actually...)
> 
> It's been in the pipeline since this time last year, when I happened to glance at a shelf in the library and see the title of a book that inspired a story: _Look Homeward, Angel_ , by Thomas Wolfe. If you read it, there's actually a few connections to Supernatural. But that's not the point. The title of that book is taken from John Milton's poem, "Lycidas". It's a little bit dense, but worth the read. And also has connections to this fic!
> 
> With all that said...let's get this show on the road.

Dean died in that church. Sam was going to go through with the ritual—was going to slam the gates of Hell and die in the process, just like he wanted—and then Dean got in the way. Gave his soul to Death in exchange for Sam’s life.

Sam survived. He screamed for anyone who would listen—anyone—to help him, help Dean, and only Castiel arrived. Out of the whole host of Heaven, out of all the angels, only Castiel came to their side. Maybe he should have expected that. Castiel was Dean’s angel, his guardian, whether by Heavenly ordination or his own appointment. No one else cared.

Holding his brother’s broken body in his arms, Sam begged Castiel to bring him back. To put life back into Dean’s eyes. To make him laugh and fight and smile again. Like he had before. But Castiel only wept. He fell to his knees beside Sam and gently touched his hand to Dean’s forehead, tears streaking his face. Struck dumb, Castiel only shook his head when Sam repeated his plea. 

Sam had thought that the worst thing in the world was seeing Dean dead. He was wrong. The worst thing was seeing his brother’s angel beside the empty body crying because he could not pull Dean’s soul back this time.

Castiel helped Sam get back to the bunker. He stayed through the funeral—through Sam calling other hunters to see if they would come, through building the pyre, through Garth and Krissy and Charlie and Missouri (the only ones left now) arriving, through burning Dean’s body in the dark of the night. And then he was gone.

That was the first night Sam prayed. “Come back,” he whispered, curling up in the middle of Dean’s bed and letting his tears soak the pillow. “Please, Cas, come back.”

***

The trials left Sam changed. He could see it in the mirror, where his eyes were hollow and his cheeks were sunken. He couldn’t run very far or fast now, and he couldn’t lift the same weight he used to. His aim was as good as ever, but chopping off vampire heads was impossible. Sometimes he got headaches for no reason at all that left his eyes blurry and his whole body shaking. Once in a while, he would have a seizure so bad that if he had been a normal person they would have taken him to a hospital. As it was, the first seizure shook everyone so badly that they forced him into bed rest for a week after he recovered. 

With symptoms like that, it was out of the question for him to keep being an active hunter. But Garth, Kevin, Charlie, and Krissy (and her friends, Josephine and Aidan) stayed on. Sam found that he didn’t mind doing all the research and sending the others out to do the dirty work. Sometimes he still went out, but he found that a salt and burn was one thing—a werewolf or vampire was a whole other story. Getting thrown into walls used to barely faze him, but now one good hit was enough to leave him limping for a fortnight afterwards. 

So he helped from the information end: spent hours doing all the research he could, sometimes going along to help with interviews. It was kind of miserable, actually. He’d always thought about retirement, but that retirement had been on his terms, not on someone else’s. He had to stay behind and watch while the kids (because they were all really kids, even Charlie) went out. They were the ones saving people, hunting things, carrying on the family business. 

After the fourth time that Aidan called in a panic because someone figured out that he wasn’t actually an FBI agent, Sam set up a series of false identities so that his friends could have suspicious police call Sam to verify their identity. It felt weird, for a while, like he was a little kid trying on his dad’s clothes. Like he was trying to act like Bobby. But, eventually, he settled into it. It was good work for him, work he liked. And he didn’t have to do it all the time, anyway. Most of it was research.

Often, he had to go down and search through books in the vast libraries of the bunker. If it existed, no matter how weird or esoteric the lore, it was probably buried somewhere down in those nightmarishly dusty stacks. It was lonely work, and sometimes Sam found himself praying. “We could use your help, Cas,” he murmured, pulling books from the shelf. “Really. You’d like this one. It’s funny. Fairies and pranks and tipsy elves. Reminds me of Dean.”


	2. Chapter 2

Krissy turned out to be a very good hunter. She picked up where Dean left off, but did everything her way. She kept the other hunters in line, set up ways and means to get illegal or rare items, and started bringing people together. “It’s dumb that you and Dean never tried to actually bring everyone in here,” she said bluntly when Sam started asking questions. “Seriously, Sam. Dumb. You’re getting stupid in your old age.” 

Sam was proud of her. She was kind of like a little sister he’d never expected. They were all like weird younger siblings, or maybe distant cousins that he’d never known that he had. Even though they were young, the new generation of hunters had good game. They didn’t always pretend to be FBI agents: they were friends of deceased youth, young reporters, children of coworkers. 

After the sixth time that Aidan tripped a burglar alarm and had to run away, Sam taught him how to pick locks so that they could break and enter more easily. But Aidan was very competent in the realm of people skills. He knew how to chat up victims, interrogate tough-to-crack witnesses, and stall angry monsters better than Sam did. It was great.

Jo was spectacular at being a hunter in general. She was organized, more so than anyone else in the bunker. Keeping calm under fire was her specialty, and often Sam heard from Krissy or Garth that the only reason the monster hadn’t ganked them was because Jo pulled some miracle out of her sleeve while the rest of them were busy panicking. 

And Charlie was her own special brand of good. Her hacking skills got them whatever they needed whenever they needed it. The deed to the land on which the bunker had been built was now officially in the Winchester name. 

Garth and Kevin, too, had their heads on straight. They went out together often when cases called for their particular skillsets. For whatever reason, Garth had money—an actual, legitimate income—so he and Kevin started taking on overseas jobs. Sam was surprised when they started bringing home foreign lore and knowledge, and added it to the collection in the bunker.

But for all the good things, Sam had started to notice gray hair appearing when he looked in the mirror. He still looked young enough, but that change was enough to scare him. Leaning on the bathroom counter one very early morning, Sam closed his eyes tight. He was shaking already, and he was pretty sure that a seizure was going to hit him before it was even ten o’clock. “Cas, come back, please. I’m scared. I’m really scared.”

***

They had to jump through lots of hoops in those early days. The bunker was full of surprises, and they spent just as much time chasing down ghosts and monsters within their own walls as they did chasing down creatures outside of them. The Men of Letters had kept artifacts, deadly weapons, documents full of spells and dangerous old lore all packed into one relatively small bunker…it was a madhouse, really.

Crowley, though, was desperate to help them out. Since Sam had cured him of being a demon, he was no longer quite the evil self-righteous prick he’d been before. Now he was just a self-righteous prick. It was widely suspected that no heart of gold lurked under Crowley’s exterior: he was all ass. But he wasn’t a demonic ass anymore, and he wasn’t particularly evil. Just…totally selfish, and a total asshole to everyone in the bunker. But some absolutely bizarre loyalty to Sam kept him from being altogether awful. 

Understandably, after the debacle with the tablets, Kevin didn’t trust Crowley one bit. He got into the habit of spraying Crowley with a spray bottle every time he came into a room, actually. But Sam did his best to play mediator. After a while (say, six or seven months) the pair began to cautiously figure out how to work together to understand the tablet fragments that kept trickling into the bunker and into Winchester custody.

Everyone else was already getting along well. It was messy and it was awkward and it was ridiculous and it was theirs, and Sam sometimes caught himself wishing that his whole life had been like this. With all of them, living together and taking care of each other. A big family that didn’t begin or end with blood, and never would.

Sam watched them one night from the balcony over the bunker’s nexus. He leaned on the rail, feeling suddenly short of breath and ignoring it. Below, Kevin and Crowley bickered over the meaning of a tablet fragment, Garth catalogued a series of indeterminately-shaped objects from inside of a trunk, Charlie added everything to their digital database, and the kids cast salt rounds for a hunt in Oregon. Jo sang along to pop songs, with Krissy occasionally joining in just to sing the chorus. They both had nice voices, but were screeching like drowning cats to mess with Aidan, who covered his ears and yelled every time they hit a particularly high note. Charlie was laughing herself sick at Garth’s sock puppet, which was also apparently singing along to the songs. They looked…well. They looked happy. They were happy, and so was Sam. Right now, Sam really couldn’t wish for more.

Actually, that was a lie. He could wish for more, and he did. “I wish you were here, Cas,” Sam said softly. “You’re the only thing missing.”


	3. Chapter 3

Over time, things continued to be all right. It was a bit of a surprise, actually. Sam had sort of expected it all to fall apart eventually, but a year after everyone moved into the bunker things were still running more smoothly than they had for literal, actual years. Charlie and Jo started dating, which was pretty nice. Krissy rolled her eyes and groaned about it a lot, but Sam suspected that she was happy with the turn of events. 

Crowley began to put together a memoir of Hell (at least as he recalled it) which he believed would be invaluable history now the gates were shut. He spent hours dictating in the library, telling all to one of the desktop computers with voice-to-text software that Charlie had retrieved. No matter how often Sam and Garth tried sneaking in to listen, they could never catch the former demon in the act. He always seemed to know when someone was lurking around the corner. And when Crowley was done, they could never track down the files of the voice recordings. 

Aidan was a good kid, if sometimes irresponsible, and Sam began to put more weight on his shoulders as time went by. Kevin disapproved, but Sam ignored him. Prophets of the Lord only went so far, after all, and Kevin was basically still a high school student. Besides, he was still translating the rest of the demon tablet (for posterity’s sake alone) and he had his own job. It wasn’t Kevin’s job to see that everyone grew into an adequate hunter. That was Sam’s job, thank you very much. Aidan didn’t seem to mind the extra attention, actually, and Sam had fun. He started to realize why Dean had loved being the big brother so much. Right now, he was the big brother—and that was different than being the little brother. It was special. 

Sam began having dreams. They were odd, abstract, taking place in a world that was real and not real—filled with strange geometries and colors that, when he woke, he couldn’t give a name. They weren’t bad dreams, only sometimes a little unpleasant. Every one left him with a feeling of gaping loneliness and longing that didn’t seem to want to go away when he woke up.

“I’d love to know what’s going on, Cas.” Sam stared determinedly at the ceiling and thought very hard in Castiel’s direction. He waited a while before finally sitting up to begin his day. On the way to the bathroom, he added quietly, “You could at least leave me a note.”

***

Two years after the day Hell sealed, Sam went to visit Missouri in Lawrence. It was a bit of a haul, but he was getting good at predicting when he’d start to have trouble and he knew he could make it all right. Of course, she knew he was coming before he even arrived, even though he hadn’t thought to call. By the time the Impala was turning up her driveway, she was standing on the porch with her hands on her hips. 

“Sam Winchester,” she said after a long hug, “it has been too long. Come in and sit down.”

Gladly, Sam complied. He was getting the shakes again, and he’d barely been able to finish the drive. Missouri sat him down in the living room and brought him a glass of iced tea and a plate of (still-hot and stubbornly gooey) brownies.

“Thank you,” Sam remembered to say through an overfull mouth. His headache wasn’t too bad yet. The very air of Missouri’s house was soothing. He felt calmer here than he had felt at the bunker in weeks. “You saw me coming?”

Missouri settled herself comfortably into a soft chair decorated with threadbare afghans and pillows with the sequins mostly off. She was getting older, Sam noticed for perhaps the first time, with wrinkles appearing in her face and delicate liver spots filigreeing her hands. “Of course,” she said. “I didn’t want you to think I’d lost my touch. How are things with your crew?”

Sam swallowed a bite of brownie. “It’s all good. Really, really good. They know what they’re doing—we’re thinking about starting to put the word out more, bring in a few more hunters to fill out the ranks, that sort of thing. Without Hell, everything is…”

“Calm,” Missouri supplied. Her eyes were keen, glittering in the late-afternoon light that shone in ribbons of color through the curtains. “I can feel it. The wounds on the world are healing. No more demons tearing holes in everything.”

“Yeah.” Sam nodded. He leaned back against the sofa. “As many ghosts and ghouls and old gods as ever, though.”

She picked up a brownie with a paper handkerchief produced as if by magic. “That’s why we have you.” She took a large bite and smiled sadly through the chocolate. “But I don’t think that’s why you’re really here, Sam.”

He paused. His head throbbed a little. “No,” he admitted. He hesitated, something catching in his chest. But because Sam was A Well-Adjusted Adult Who Believed That Men Could Be Vulnerable And Still Retain Their Masculinity, he forged onward. “Something’s wrong with me, Missouri. Since I shut the gates, I…” He shrugged. “I don’t understand it, but nothing on the tablet is giving me any hints.”

Missouri’s mouth tightened almost imperceptibly. “Do you want to know what I’m seeing?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. 

“Your soul is shattered,” she said. 

Sam’s stomach lurched and he felt the sofa tilt under him. “Wh-what?”

“Shutting those gates, taking on that Divine power…it wounded you in ways I can’t even understand.” Missouri’s voice was soft. Compassionate. Terrifying. “You were the one who was supposed to die, and even though you lived, the price still has to be paid somehow.”

“Oh shit,” Sam said. His head was pounding now, his hands shaking. “Oh, shit.”

Missouri reached out and took Sam’s hand in hers. He tried to focus on the sensation of her fingers rubbing circles on his palm and not on the fear. “I don’t think it’s going to kill you. There’s something—wrapped around you, I can feel it every time I get close—that’s protecting you.”

Breath hitching, Sam demanded, “What!? What’s protecting me?”

The seer studied Sam’s face for a moment before responding. “As far as I can tell, it’s the Divine Grace of an angel.”

That night, in Missouri’s guest room, Sam couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned until the cheerful little clock blinked “2:00 AM” at him. Finally, he climbed out of bed and knelt down on the floor. It seemed like the right thing to do, even though usually he didn’t bother. He twisted his hands together, still feeling his fingers trembling. 

“Hey, Cas,” Sam whispered. His words disappeared into the darkness. “I…shit, I know it’s you protecting me. You’re the only one who’d do it. No one else cares enough. I…thank you. I thought I wanted to die when I was finishing the trials. And…I got this far, and I’ve got a family again, and we’re doin’ good. I don’t want to go anymore. I’m not ready.” He swallowed hard, suddenly and absurdly feeling choked. But Sam Winchester did not back down from something like this, not anymore. “Thank you, Castiel. I hope you’re safe, wherever you are. The door is always open at the bunker…when you want to come home.”


	4. Chapter 4

Two years after Cas left, a blonde girl who wore too much eyeliner and had eyes as blue as a winter sky showed up at the bunker’s door. Her greeting was abrupt and uncomplimentary. “Jeez, Winchester,” she said, looking coolly up at Sam, “you look like you got hit with a truck.”

“Be nice!” Charlie scolded, then paused. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Name’s Claire Novak,” the girl said, and every alarm in Sam’s head went off at once.

“How did you find us?” he asked. This couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t.

She shrugged diffidently. “I didn’t. Castiel brought me here. Where is he, anyway?”

The air itself froze solid. Sam couldn’t breathe. “We don’t know,” Sam said, half expecting not to hear his voice. “Is he all right?”

“Oh, he’s the same as ever, a total dick. But he got me out of foster care, so he’s a little better than last time I saw him,” Claire said. She shifted the duffel bag to her other shoulder. “Any chance you’re gonna invite me in?”

Of course they let her in. They gave her a room close to Krissy, and to absolutely no one’s surprise they got along like a house on fire. Claire got Charlie to teach her better hacking skills and got Kevin to teach her Enochian and got Garth to teach her to shoot. She and Aidan dated for a while, but that fell through after one too many arguments.

Claire was sour, petulant, fragile, and warm by turns, and Sam thought navigating her moods was the worst job ever. But he did it. They needed each other, even if Claire never acknowledged it. He tried not to think too hard about how familiar her blue eyes were, or how her speech sometimes had a familiar rhythm, or how much like Cas she really looked.

Eventually, Sam found himself watching the young hunters one evening after dinner. They were all clustered around Jo’s laptop, laughing hysterically at some video. For the first time since her arrival, Claire looked happy. Charlie, working on her own computer, caught Sam’s eye and smiled, jerking a thumb at the kids and rolling her eyes. Sam just shrugged and grinned. 

***

It was five years to the day since Dean died and Sam realized it while he was washing dishes. At first the recognition sort of itched at the back of his brain—uncomfortable but nothing more. Everyone else was out (Charlie and Jo on a date; Crowley out antique-hunting; Kevin at some political seminar at the local community college; Garth, Claire, and Aidan on a hunt; Krissy shopping). The bunker was empty and quiet and Sam kept expecting Dean to barge through the door, making crude jokes and asking Sam to go see a movie. 

But he didn’t.

At some point Sam decided that a beer was a good idea, and by the time he had drunk four, he began to have the dim recognition that there was a bigger problem afoot. He ended up in Dean’s room, usually locked to prevent its being used for anything else, sitting on the floor beside the bed and staring at a photo of Dean and Sam together that was laying on the dresser. He thought Bobby had taken it, actually, at some point just before the Apocalypse. (The first one.) Dean was laughing and Sam was laughing and they were in the act of pelting each other with apples in the junkyard. It was an impossible picture, horrible and impossible and it never could have been true but Sam remembered that afternoon with absolute clarity and now he was crying.

The door creaked and Sam looked up in alarm. Krissy was standing in the doorway. He tried to get up, tried to explain himself, but he couldn’t seem to move or make a coherent noise.

Krissy sat down on the bed. “It’s five years today, right,” she said, “so I thought…maybe I should come home. And check on you.”

“I’m fine,” Sam tried to say, except his tongue tangled up and wouldn’t say what he wanted it to and instead said, “I miss him.”

“I know,” Krissy said. “I do, too.”

Sam’s hands were shaking when he opened the dresser drawer. He pulled out a pendant. It was a grotesque little death’s-head totemic thing, gold paint chipped and worn with years of wear. It sat heavy in his hand. “He didn’t know I had it.”

Krissy reached out and brushed the tip of one finger over the thing’s surface. Her face was stark and warm in the light of the bedside lamp. “What is it?”

“It was Dean’s. I made it for him when we were kids,” Sam said. He studied the thing. “I left it here after he died.”

The bed creaked as Krissy shifted. She said nothing. Sam had to look away. There wasn’t pity in her eyes. Her gaze was unsettlingly direct and open. He stared instead at the amulet in his hand. “I wish he had known.”

After a moment, Krissy spoke. “Can I ask you a weirdly personal question?”

“Shoot,” Sam said. He glanced up to find her leaning forward. 

“At Dean’s funeral.” She paused and chewed at her lip. A very Dean-like gesture. “You didn’t cry, Sam. Why?”

Sam took a moment to think about that question. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. 

“And you haven’t cried over it ever before, either. At least not that I’ve seen.” Krissy sat back, crumpling the covers in her hands. “What’s happening, Sam? Why didn’t you mourn?”

“I—I—” Sam struggled to get words out, but nothing would come to him. He shook his head mutely and realized dimly that his face was wet again. 

Krissy slid off the bed with a bump and leaned against him, wrapping her arms around him and pulling his head down onto her shoulder. She made soothing noises at him. Sam would have thought it undignified, but he was drunk enough that he didn’t really care what happened. She held him until the tears stopped (or at least stemmed) and he wasn’t outright sobbing anymore. She helped him back to his room, divested him of all his weapons (even those on the walls or tucked away in cabinets), and quietly took all them out of the room while Sam changed. He vaguely appreciated the gesture of taking away the weapons. It was very kind of Krissy.

When she came back no mention was made of the weapons, for which he was grateful. “Get in bed, Godzilla,” she said brusquely, turning down the covers. 

Sam climbed in, absurdly grateful for the attention of a small girl roughly half his age. “Thank you, Krissy,” he said quietly, letting her smooth the covers over his shoulders.

Krissy shrugged flippantly, but her eyes were still tight and worried. “It’s nothing.” She held out a glass of water. “Drink this, and I’ll get you another one before you sleep. No hangover for you.” Sam obeyed her. It was probably best. 

She set a piece of paper down on the nightstand before she left. “I’ll tell them not to wake you tomorrow,” she said as she shut the door.

Sam stared at the photo beside the lamp for a minute before he moved to turn out the light. It ached when he looked at it. And it wasn’t just because of Dean. There was one other person in that damn photograph. Cas, trenchcoat off for once, sitting on the hood of a car, posture stiff and straight, hair blown everywhere in the wind. He was smiling. 

“Damn it, Cas. Where are you?” 

He shut off the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, the Samulet. The vehicle of all Winchester angst...
> 
> Early post because, as it turns out, Monday is a REALLY bad day to try to post anything. It'll be Sunday-morning chapters from here on out.


	5. Chapter 5

Life went on in leaps and bounds. Kevin was becoming a real master of old Biblical lore—compiling an entire database of all their knowledge, with Crowley’s assistance. He’d cross-referenced tablets to versions of the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, and the Talmud. A whole new section in the library sprouted up, seemingly overnight, holding all of the new books Kevin and Crowley bought.

Sam helped when he could, but they didn’t need him as much as before. His job was different: to comb through all the old records of the Men of Letters, finding their contacts and family listings to track down those who still remained and were active hunters. On his own, it would have been a total nightmare and probably would have taken him until he was as old as he looked, but luckily he had Charlie. And she was really amazing. She could find unlisted numbers, hidden emails, records of moves and international travel…things that Sam could really only dream about.

When Charlie found the individual in question, Sam made the call. If he had to estimate a number, he would say that 98% were completely fruitless. People didn’t know, had forgotten, hung up the phone when Sam tried to explain. Those who did bother to answer, though, were productive. Though no one would come to the bunker and be an official part of the new Men of Letters, most would at least let him put down their names and contact information to increase the sum of people they had available. And most of those would give him other things: names of their own contacts, the local spooks in their town, tips and hints for who to call next, locations of artifacts. Those who gave information would also ask for it, so Sam passed along whatever tidbits they might be interested in for their own work. It was a fair trade.

It was Garth that managed to track down the best person, though: Tamara Chikezie, from back before the Apocalypse. She was in England, but agreed to come back and join the group at the bunker. 

“Sam,” she greeted coolly upon stepping in the door.

“Hi, Tamara,” Sam said cautiously. He held out his hand tentatively. Their last meeting…had not been good. He wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t hit him.

She shook his hand firmly. “I don’t like you,” she said bluntly, “but I like what you’re doing. This is good, and I want in.”

Sam glanced at Krissy, standing to his right. She nodded. “I think it’s a good idea,” she said.

“Then, welcome to the Men of Letters,” Sam said, gesturing at the bunker behind him.

***

Once, when Sam was driving through The Middle of Nowhere, America, he stopped to eat in a little Biggerson’s. He had just ordered a sandwich when two of the other chairs at the table scraped back and two people sat down.

It took Sam a moment to recognize the pair of them, but when he did it was almost a literal spit-take. “Aaron Bass?” he managed to say.

“In the flesh,” the man said proudly. “Do you know how hard you are to find?”

“I do my best to be untraceable.” Sam shrugged and took a sip of water, suppressing his shock in favor of a smile. “Good to see you, man. What are you doing here?”

The golem, seated across the table, shifted. The chair creaked alarmingly. “Aaron wanted to see you,” he said. He didn’t roll his eyes, but Sam got the distinct sense that he would if he could. “Of course that’s a valuable waste of our time.”

Aaron scowled up at the golem. “Oh, shut up,” he said. He looked back at Sam. “It took me forever, but I heard about Dean.”

“…oh,” Sam said. He suddenly didn’t feel like talking at all.

“I didn’t want to ask what happened, just…my condolences,” Aaron said. He hesitated, but plowed on. “He was a decent guy, even if he was kind of a dick.”

Sam summoned up a smile from some sort of happiness he didn’t feel. “Yeah. He was.”

The kid bit his lip. “You know, I sometimes wish we’d have come to the Bunker with you,” he said. “I mean…not to hide, just…base of operations, y’know?”

“Be really, really glad you didn’t,” Sam said dryly. “It kind of sucked for a while.”

“Yeah. I heard something about shutting the Gates of Hell?” Aaron asked.

Sam nodded. “Yeah. No more demons. How’s hunting the Thule Society going?”

The golem laughed, just a bit unpleasantly. “Quite well, I think.”

“He thinks,” Aaron muttered. “But that’s because he doesn’t throw up when he sees blood.”

“It’s not your fault you have a weak human constitution,” the golem said. He patted Aaron consolingly on the shoulder. “Just as it isn’t my fault that I’m completely invulnerable.”

Aaron rolled his eyes. “Can you believe this guy?” he asked Sam, and Sam couldn’t help but laugh. They talked for the rest of lunch, and when they were done they went their separate ways. The golem stood by Aaron’s truck and looked pointedly at his watch. 

“Hope to see you soon,” Aaron said with a smile, shaking Sam’s hand firmly.

“Doors are always open, man,” Sam replied. He didn’t bother with a handshake, instead throwing an arm slightly awkwardly around Aaron’s skinny shoulders and half-hugging him. 

He stood in the parking lot and watched Aaron and the golem driving off down the highway toward their next destination. It gave him a warm feeling to know that Aaron was still out there. Still fighting the good fight. That the crew at the Bunker weren’t in this alone and, if Sam had anything to say about it, no hunter ever would be again.


	6. Chapter 6

By the time Sam was thirty-eight, even more hunters had moved in. Tamara wasn’t the last to arrive: the old hunter Irv Franklin brought his very young hunting partner Tracy Bell to live at the bunker. Upon seeing Sam for the first time, Tracy glared for a minute and then sighed. “I can’t hit someone who looks like you,” she said, sounding disgusted. “And I wanted to.”

“Sorry about her,” Irv said later over drinks in the kitchen, when Tracy was moving into her room with the help of the other girls. “She’s still broken up about the demon who killed her parents when Lucifer was walking the earth.”

Sam shrugged wearily and downed half the bottle in front of him. “I’d be pissed at me, too. I don’t blame her for being mad.”

“You should,” Kevin pointed out quietly from where he was sitting on the counter. “You closed the Gates of Hell, after all.”

Irv’s eyebrows shot up. “So it’s true, then?”

Sam nodded. He was going to say something, but Kevin beat him to it. “Are you serious!? It’s been eight years! How do you not know!?”

“No one knows anything, kid!” Irv snapped. His knuckles whitened around the beer bottle. “As far as most of us folks know, the demons are just waiting for us to put our guard down.”

“Hell’s sealed,” Crowley said, appearing abruptly and silently from beside the fridge. “Trust me, darling, I would know if it wasn’t.”

Irv looked up at the former demon, startled. “I’ll take your word on it,” he said, and edged his chair away from Crowley.

The conversation petered off into a discussion of what was going to happen next. Sam got up and left after a few minutes of it. A buzzing had started somewhere in his head and he didn’t want to be standing in front of everyone when the buzzing turned into a torn-metal screech and he started to seize. 

He wandered deeper into the bunker, down one of the underused corridors that led to the primitive (well, distinctly-lacking-in-Bowflex-but-otherwise-fine) gym. No one was down here: Krissy and Jo had commandeered Tracy’s attention, Tamara and Garth were off on a hunt, the other men were upstairs in the kitchen, Aidan was in town, Claire was fixing one of the water heaters, and Charlie was off for the weekend at GenCon. For the moment, at least, Sam was completely alone.

Tracy’s comment (“I can’t hit someone who looks like you”) scratched and pounded on his mind, demanding that he examine it further. What did he look like, anyway? What had she seen that was so bad? Sam didn’t see the point in denying his curiosity, so he went into the locker room and looked into one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors installed near the showers. 

All things considered, he didn’t look that bad. He wasn’t decrepit by any stretch of the imagination. True, his hair was now more of a gray shot through with brown and his eyes were more sunken than he’d really noticed before, but that wasn’t too bad. He’d definitely seen worse. What had Tracy seen, then, to make her think that he couldn’t take a punch? His clothes still fit, and if he had taken to wearing his belts tighter these days, and if his old flannels hung oddly on him, and if he sometimes thought that even small portions of food were hard to stomach…well, that was his business, not Tracy’s. 

Fine. He looked really bad. Showered, happy, not covered in the blood and dust of the road, but really bad. Whatever had started with taking on the Trials was still exacting its toll. 

“You know,” Sam said aloud, and twitched at the weird echoes of his voice in the vacant locker room, “if you want to protect me, Cas, you could maybe keep me looking like I’m thirty-eight instead of going on sixty. That would be nice.”

***

Things got ugly next year at the end of April when Walpurgisnacht rolled around. Witchcraft spiked all over the country—all over the world, actually, Sam ended up learning basic Arabic and Mandarin so he could make international calls—and it was a little nuts.

“We used to work to prevent things like this,” Crowley said reflectively as he methodically wrote out instructions on how to fight curses. “I always kept it as a top priority.”

“Demons fought witches?” Tracy said. Her eyebrows rose nearly to her hairline and she paused in typing on her computer. “I can’t really believe that.”

Kevin shrugged. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s impossible to believe about Crowley.” He threw a hex bag across the room to Tamara. “That should keep off most of the minor curses. Can’t say about anything stronger.”

Crowley flipped a pen at Kevin, who ducked it neatly and kept working. “They say to believe at least one impossible thing before breakfast each day. And of course we fought witches. They were a nuisance and got in the way of real direct scheming.”

“Oh, so sad for you,” Claire said. She set down another handgun. She’d already stacked several neatly into a box, each field-stripped and cleaned well. 

Irv, casting cold iron rounds, chuckled. “Gotta say, never thought I’d see the day when I missed chasing down demons.”

“You can say that again,” Sam muttered. He collected a stack of paper from the printer and dropped it with a thud beside Tamara. “Here’s all of the information I can find on groups that might be willing to help run interference until the night’s over.”

“Perfect,” Tamara said. She set the hex bag aside and began paging through the printout. 

Aidan and Josephine staggered into the nexus carrying huge plastic bins filled with iron manacles and shackles. Josephine dropped her box next to Sam. “That is literally every single one I could find,” she panted. 

Charlie and Krissy barged abruptly into the room. “Sam, Sam, Sam!” Charlie shrieked. “There’s footage of a bonfire going up in town! There’s people marching in the streets! It’s starting!” 

There was a moment of expectant silence as every eye in the room turned to Sam. He looked at Krissy, who nodded firmly, and then Sam said, “Grab your stuff!” 

The nexus exploded into activity. Sam went to get his own duffel and gun, but Tamara caught him in the hallway just out of sight of the rest of the nexus. “Is it wise for you to go?” she asked softly. 

“What?” Sam drew back from her. Behind him, he heard a burst of laughter as Aidan said something funny. 

“I mean that you shouldn’t go. Your fits—they’re getting more frequent. And worse. A ghost is one thing, but this night…” Tamara shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Sam scowled. “I have!”

Tamara looked earnest, eyes wide, mouth set and determined. “Yes, and that was almost a decade ago, before you wrecked your body in the Trials. And you’ve said it yourself—witches are worse than the Leviathan ever were, or even demons. We can’t risk taking you.”

There was something Sam could have said, some protest he could have made, but he hesitated for just a moment too long. Tamara nodded sharply, said, “Good,” and turned back to head to the garage with the rest. Sam was left alone in the corridor.

A few moments after silence descended in the nexus, Irv appeared in the doorway. “They wouldn’t let me go, either,” he said wryly. “What say we have a drink and man the phones so that the poor suckers who call can actually get some help?”

Sam agreed, and he and Irv spent the rest of the night—except for the twenty minutes Sam spent in the bathroom seizing and seeing colors spiral around his head—manning the phones. People did call, though not many, and most of the calls were desperate, panicky, and cut off too soon. With the night like it was, Sam told himself that he was glad he was here, helping people. 

But when the rest came back—Krissy limping, Charlie temporarily blinded and being half-carried by Kevin who was himself sporting a gash on his shoulder, Tracy able to speak only in the croaking of a frog, and even Crowley bedecked in the garish red of blood—Sam couldn’t help but wish that he’d have been able to go along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the cast grows...


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, everyone!! I totally forgot to post a chapter this weekend...

On the tenth anniversary of the Sealing of Hell’s Gates, someone (Crowley) decided to throw a party. There was enough alcohol to stock a liquor store, balloons and banners and a disturbing playlist that consisted of bubbly pop music alternating with horror movie soundtracks, and a sheet cake that someone (Charlie) had decorated with tiny candy pitchforks and fondant flames. 

The party was, all things considered, fun. Irv got roaring drunk and sang along to the pop songs, even as Garth kept challenging Tamara to contests of arm or thumb wrestling. Krissy, Tracy, Claire, Aidan, and Kevin sat around talking and telling jokes about obscure TV shows Sam had never seen. Charlie, Josephine, Sam, and Crowley ate cake and traded stories about the stupidest hunts they’d ever been on. But around the time that someone (Aidan) slammed an empty bottle down on the table and shouted, “Let’s play Spin the Bottle!”, Sam decided that it was time for him to go. He’d waited long enough.

Quietly, without disturbing the circle of happy, tipsy hunters on the floor, Sam went up the stairs and collected his jacket from the front hall. He heard, behind him, a roar of approval as two awkward people had to kiss. He couldn’t help smiling. It was good that they were having fun. 

He went out and walked around and up the hill. The trees were bright green and quite cheerful. No flowers grew around here, which didn’t bother Sam. The time for such a bloom was long past and Sam was allergic to like half of the native plants anyway. The sky was surprisingly clear, affording space for perfect shafts of golden sunset light to flash through the trees as he passed. Underfoot, leaves and debris crunched and crackled cheerfully. It was a good day.

At the top of the hill, Sam paused and looked down into the dell below. It was just a shallow little bowl, hard to see clearly from this distance, where Dean had been buried. After all, this was the anniversary of Dean’s death. Sam owed his brother a visit. 

Suddenly, Sam saw something move among the trees. He tensed, hand sliding back to where his gun was tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Carrying it was a habit he just couldn’t kick, not even in this new safe world. Carefully, trying to avoid making too much noise, Sam moved down the slope. He didn’t know who was down there. Everyone else was inside. It might be a deer, but then again…it might not. It wouldn’t be a demon, but plenty of other monsters had enough of a beef with the Winchesters to try showing up at the bunker.

About fifteen feet from the bottom Sam paused to get a better look. He leaned forward, braced against a tree, staring fixedly at the person—which the figure definitely was—until he could get a read on who and what they were.

His heart almost stopped.

Shock of black hair, stiffly graceful movements, a crumpled tan trenchcoat…

Sam lunged down the slope, breaking out of the tree line, tripping and falling as he went. “CAS!” 

The angel turned fast. Sam had just time to register a face shocked with panic and pain, hands raised as if in defense, before—as if he’d never been—Castiel was gone.

Sam didn’t bother getting up from where he’d fallen. Disappointment was definitely there, but it wasn’t as forceful as Sam might have expected. He scooted over to sit by the grave, resting his hand on the headstone. “Guess I’m not the only one who remembers what crappy anniversary today is,” he remarked with a wry smile. “I think I’m starting to get why he always pissed you off, Dean…”

***

Life fell into a distinct and comforting rhythm. Sam and Tracy hunted together, more often than not, taking on close-range and easy hunts. Sam’s symptoms didn’t get much worse, but they also didn’t get better. Charlie and Josephine went on dates. Garth had a girlfriend, then lost a girlfriend, then got a permanent position as a volunteer for an art therapy class in town. Crowley started teaching people to cook. Kevin took on the challenge of getting a college degree from an online university. Tamara loosened up and stopped being so obnoxious all the time. Claire got a full-time job at the nearest Hot Topic. 

They played poker and slapjack and whist in the nexus in the evenings and had pancakes and bacon and cupcakes for breakfast. The library expanded to hold a fiction section, by popular demand. (Sam and Charlie had book-shopping dates where they explored used book stores and bought every cheap copy of every amazingly terrible out-of-print paperback they could find.) Charlie committed credit fraud so that Kevin and Garth could have proper workout equipment in the gym. Life was—for the first time maybe ever—incredibly, incredibly good.

Which was why Sam nearly had a panic attack when Krissy appeared in the archive door and said seriously, “Sam. We have to talk.”

“Um. Sure. Come sit down?” Sam tried to sound calm and adult and professional. He sat down next to the shelf he’d been working his way through.

Krissy joined him. “Okay, so, I have a question.” She was staring at her hands, which were twisting and clutching at each other very oddly.

“What’s up?” Sam asked. 

She said something very fast and very quietly.

“Huh?”

“I said,” Krissy said, only slightly louder, “will you walk me down the aisle when Aidan and I get married this fall?”

Sam took a moment to think. And then it processed, and suddenly he and Krissy were both crying and hugging and laughing hysterically and he felt good. “Of course, you idiot,” he said, “of course I will!”


	8. Chapter 8

Krissy and Aidan took a real honeymoon. A real one, where—courtesy of one of the African hunters they’d helped out during the mess that was Walpurgisnacht—the pair went to Africa to go and see wildlife and observe some of the African cryptids and supernatural creatures. Sam was utterly jealous of them, but thrilled that they got to go.

With life calm after the wedding, Sam took the time to begin to rethink his life a bit. He wasn’t really hunting at all anymore. He did lots of research for everyone else, but it wasn’t his priority. He, Crowley, and Irv (and Tamara and Charlie, to an extent) were certainly the senior people at the bunker. Irv and Charlie virtually never went out, either, and Tamara was increasingly inclined to play a supporting role as well when the younger set went out hunting. 

So Sam thought and researched and thought some more and after all that took up his first hobby: gardening. And not the sort of awkward gardening he associated with elderly folks who didn’t have much to do. No, Sam decided that he would go on being useful. So he converted one of the unused storage rooms into an indoor greenhouse intended to be used for growing all the things the bunker would ever need to supply a hunt.

He installed grow lights and special heat lamps and set up a hydroponic wall for those plants that could tolerate it. The storage room was large, but poorly ventilated—Sam fixed that, too, setting up industrial fans where necessary. He also re-sealed and insulated the room for a constant temperature and climate control. He got some help from Garth at one point when he was installing the huge shelves intended to hold the plants, but otherwise worked alone. 

When the room was finished, Sam decided on plants. He picked whatever he could of all the useful witch-plants (deadly nightshade, hemlock, castor bean, tansy, belladonna, foxglove), the generally better healing plants (hollyhock, spider flower, St. John’s Wort, ferns for fern seeds, poppies), and things that Crowley snickered at because they were kitchen herbs (basil, rosemary, parsley, sage, thyme, lavender, hyssop, angelica). He didn’t fill all of the shelf space, but continued to do research on what he might need in the future. 

He couldn’t help but notice that, despite the teasing, Crowley had moved his potted heirloom tomato plants into the greenhouse. Sam watered them with everything else and didn’t mention it.

After a while, Sam began to be interested in flowers. Josephine started it with wearing them in her hair and claiming that she was sending secret messages. The other girls soon followed, and when Crowley began to leave coded messages in their food with edible flowers, Sam realized that he and the other men of the Bunker must become informed. 

Kevin, Sam, and Garth put their heads together and came up with a few resources. There were language-of-flower dictionaries, printed back in the late 1800s, which practically fell apart when touched. They put together cheat sheets and started carrying them around so they could decode whatever the girls and Crowley were saying. For a while, the whole Bunker was full of flowers, leaving messages everywhere. 

The prevalence of flowers predictably led to Sam planting a few flowers in his greenhouse. He made sure that they were useful for some common spell before the planting—but even that wasn’t really a consideration. He planted just a few things. They were in the back, out of the way of traffic, where no one would be likely to question them. A pot of geraniums, a small pot of goldenrod, a pot of yellow and magenta zinnias, a little plastic trough planted with Chinese asters, a pot of trumpet flowers that Tracy kept calling angel trumpets, a hanging container of anemone. Not much, but Sam kept thinking about old friends the whole time.

About two weeks after all the flowers had sprouted, a small bouquet of flowers appeared in his room. They were tied with rough twine in a fragile bow. Eglantine, a flowering reed, amaranthus, white verbena, wormwood, hemlock, and butterfly weed, all clumsily and tenderly placed together in that little bouquet on Sam’s desk. He looked at it for a while, comparing the meanings to those he and Kevin and Garth had put into the cheat sheet, then hung the bouquet upside down over the desk and went back to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, late update. Sorry about that, everybody. 
> 
> Leave your guesses about the messages in the flowers in the comments. I'll let you know next week what they mean. :)


	9. Chapter 9

Sam had paced the waiting room twenty times, read every magazine in the room, watched seven episodes of Design on a Dime, and still nothing had happened. Josephine, reading glasses perched on her nose, had sighed every time he got up again. “It’s not going to be quick, you moron,” she had said before tucking herself back into the book she was reading.

“I know,” Sam had said defensively. “I just…don’t like hospitals.” Then he’d go on pacing.

But now the waiting was over, and a nice little nurse—his name was Thomas—was escorting them back to where Krissy and Aidan were. Josephine, at some point during the walk, took Sam’s hand and gripped it tightly. Sam smiled and let her. 

Thomas opened the door for them. “And here’s the happy couple!” he said cheerfully. 

“Thanks,” Sam said as he passed into the room.

The hospital room was warm and golden. Krissy, hair loose and brushed but still damp with sweat, was in a bed near the far wall. Aidan stood beside her, and each was holding a small blanket-wrapped bundle.

“Jo!” Krissy said, eyes lighting up.

“Oh my god!” Josephine squealed, darting over to stand by Krissy. Sam took a more sedate pace to get over to them.

Krissy smiled at Sam. “Hey, it’s the Eiffel Tower!” she exclaimed.

Sam rolled his eyes, but couldn’t help smiling. “Hey, kiddo. How’d it go?”

“It was fine,” she said.

Aidan looked rather tenderly down at his wife. “Of course it was. It was you,” he said.

Sam coughed, interrupting what was about to be a sappy moment. “And…what about the kids?”

“A boy and a girl,” Krissy said proudly, and promptly passed off the one she held to Josephine, who squeaked and fumbled before getting her arms properly around the baby. “That’s Lee Chambers, the girl.”

Aidan handed the baby to Sam. He took it carefully, peering down into the scrunched, red, owlish face. Aidan grinned when he said, “You are now holding Dean Chambers.”

Sam looked up, hair smacking him in the eyes. “What?”

“We named him Dean, you gigantic deaf moron,” Krissy said patiently, wearing a face-splitting smile. “It seemed like a good idea.”

“…he’d be proud,” Sam murmured. He touched the baby’s forehead with one fingertip. It wriggled and squalled a bit. Hastily, Sam handed little Dean back to Aidan. He clearly didn’t have his brother’s way with children.

***

There was a particularly weird room in the bunker: what was, according to Crowley’s esoteric knowledge, an old-fashioned operating theater. The floor was sunken, reached either by a set of narrow steps or by a ramp wide enough for a very wide gurney. Nine tiers of seats, steep enough that there was no way for the view to be blocked by being seated behind someone, rose up in concentric rings to the ceiling. The doors were all powerfully reinforced and the room was heavily warded. Even the walls—when chipped at—turned out to have cold iron rods and etched warding stones reinforcing them. 

Kevin found records that indicated that, a long time ago, the Men of Letters had actively performed experiments in this room. Tamara found the vivisection records. Sam almost threw up reading them. It was disgusting and vile and so like the Men of Letters that he almost resolved to seal the room entirely and forget it existed. 

But Garth was having none of it. “Sam,” he said, “we can use it. It’s like, like a lecture hall—we should use it.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked, squinting at Garth and waiting for the punchline.

“I mean that we should teach other hunters here,” Garth said, and smiled proudly. “They won’t live here, but we can help them—we can teach them, give them resources…”

It was a damn good idea. Sam pitched it at dinner that night, and found that there was a good deal of popular support.

“I’d love to talk about werewolves,” Irv said, staring with a half-smile into his glass.

Tamara nodded slowly. “I’m very good with vampires. And I’d be more than happy to work some sort of mythology course.”

Kevin leaped out of his chair and started pacing. “I could teach ancient languages—Sumerian, Mayan, Atlantean, Enochian, Babylonian…I’m going to need to buy textbooks…”

Crowley shrugged. “I could,” he said with a roll of the eyes, “teach…Magic 101. Or something.”

“Ooh, yes!” Charlie said, and laughed, cracking her knuckles. “Everyone should know about programming in this day and age. Time to modernize hunting!”

Claire shrugged, from where she was straddling her chair backwards. “I might be able to do something interesting with finding missing persons and stuff like that.”

“What would you teach, Garth?” Tracy asked, and took a huge serving of potato salad.

Garth looked around a bit frantically. “Um. Um. Um. I could, um, I could do a class on, um, psychology and witness interaction?”

Tamara got up to take away some of the plates and cups. “Sounds fine to me,” she said, patting Garth’s shoulder as she passed.

“I’m not teaching anything,” Krissy said. “I have enough to take care of.” She was in her comfortable chair in the corner, feeding one of the twins. (Sam thought it might be Lee. The little girl was more rambunctious than her brother and whichever baby Krissy was holding wouldn’t stop wriggling around.)

Tracy nodded. “Count me out, too. I’m too young for that yet.”

“And I’m complete crap at speaking to people,” Josephine said cheerfully. She took a bite of the potato salad on Tracy’s plate.

“Hey!” Tracy complained, swatting halfheartedly at the other girl.

Aidan glanced at Sam. “Yeah, I’m not teaching anything, either. But what about you?”

Sam coughed and leaned backwards in his chair. “I’m not sure. What would you want me to cover? I mean, it seems like you all have everything else. What’s left for me?” It was half a joke, but Sam honestly expected there to be nothing left. If there was anything, it would be dregs—things that every hunter would know. Things that they didn’t need Sam to teach.

Garth leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You could teach history.”

“History? Greeks and Romans and Napoleon? Like, high-school history class?” Josephine kicked Garth under the table and Sam heard the thud. “That is such a dumb idea! Oh my God, why am I still hunting with you?”

“No! No!” Garth yelped, scooting his chair quickly away from Josephine. “No, I mean the history of hunting! Like, who were the Men of Letters and old anecdotes of hunting and who the ancient hunters were and…” He stopped talking and took a drink of water.

“And what?” Sam raised his eyebrows.

Garth sort of managed to look Sam in the eyes. “Well. And about the Apocalypse and the angels and you and Dean.”

Sam swallowed hard. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” Garth said. He pointed around at the bunker. “I mean, look what happens when we forget our history. Look what we almost lost. And you’d have never found it if there hadn’t been some sort of weird time travel thing. What if someday Hell opens back up or the angels decide they want to kick off the Apocalypse again? We’ve got to know and you’re the only one who can teach us.”

Sam looked around the room. He saw open acceptance on the faces of every one of the younger set, while the older hunters just nodded quietly. “Okay,” he said. “I can do that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flower meanings from Chapter 8:  
> :::Sam:::  
> geraniums: true friend/stupidity/folly  
> trumpet flower/angel’s trumpet: separation  
> anemone: sickness  
> china aster: I will think of you  
> yellow zinnia: daily remembrance  
> magenta zinnia: lasting affection  
> mixed zinnias: thinking of an absent friend  
> goldenrod: encouragement  
> :::Cas:::  
> eglantine: I wound to heal  
> flowering reed: confide in heaven  
> amaranthus: hopeless/not heartless/desertion  
> white verbena: pray for me  
> wormwood: absence/do not be discouraged  
> clinging woodbine: fraternal love  
> hemlock: you will be the death of me  
> butterfly weed: let me go


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gah, sorry this is late. First week back after Spring Break was mildly hellish. -.-
> 
> Anyway, here you go. (Also, please note: only two chapters to go after this...)

They didn’t start classes right away. Charlie put out the word and started calling for RSVPs—no registration, since it was just a series of lectures, not real classes. She knocked on Sam’s door a week after the sign-ups went out. 

“We are going suit shopping,” she said, and held up a list.

It was a very long list, resembling one of Crowley’s contracts more than anything else. “What is this, Charlie?” Sam asked.

She sighed. “This is the list for your first lecture. And the applications are still rolling in. There are three more pages sitting on the printer. We don’t have enough space to fit everyone in the theater and I’m putting people on a waiting list. You might want to press your good suit.”

“I think I need to figure out what I’m going to say,” Sam muttered, feeling suddenly lightheaded.

They got him a really good suit. Krissy helped him work out what he was going to say, and Claire forced Sam to sit down and edit it so that he didn’t just talk about angels “like they’re the only things to ever happen on this planet”. He decided in the end to create a two-session lecture—the first on the ancient history of hunting (early history of mankind through the dawn of the twentieth century) and the second on the more recent events (the formation of the Men of Letters through…well, now). There would be three opportunities to take the course, Sam decided, with no repeat attendance. 

The first lecture ran magnificently. Sam discovered that he was quite fluent, especially when there was an audience in front of him. They were attentive to what he was saying and were engaged in the whole process. It was fantastic…even if half the audience, it seemed, was made of girls under the age of twenty-five. 

At the end of each two-hour session, Sam held a questioning period. On the first day, the questions were mostly academic. They asked dates, for clarification, for anecdotes, for more stories. It was nice. Like college. Sam felt a certain kinship with his old professors. 

The next day was much different. Sam’s discourse on the Men of Letters ended up taking a little bit of extra time because one of the women in the front row—she reminded him of Ellen, honestly—wanted to talk about the position of the Men of Letters as compared to feminist and social movements of the time. There was not just a lack of women in the organization, but a lack of minorities in general. Sam actually welcomed the discussion. He liked hearing about the things she knew.

He had to ask the class if they minded staying overtime—because the Apocalypse was going to take a while, with its history stretching back to Abaddon destroying the Men of Letters (and Henry Winchester) thus setting up the marriage of John and Mary, the birth of Sam, the night of the fire, Jessica’s death, and all that came after with the Righteous Man shedding blood in Hell, the raising of the dead, the Horsemen, the angels, Lucifer walking the Earth. Not one person raised a dissenting voice.

So Sam told the story and often he found himself having to take a moment to recover. The theater would sit in silence, and Sam felt his cheeks burn every time he had to stop and look away and rub a hand over his mouth, trying to figure out how to speak these unspeakable words. How to tell them about what Azazel had done to him and to so many other children. How to tell them about the year that Dean spent running away from his demon deal and how he had come back from Hell in the arms of an angel to find Sam wrapped up in a demon. How to tell them about Castiel and his odd sense of humor and his grave devotion to duty. How to explain Ruby (a woman he loved but a demon nonetheless) in a way that made any kind of sense to these children who’d never seen a demon in their lives. How to tell them about Lucifer rising and the horror of hosting him within his own body. The terror of his time in Hell (which he glossed over). The terrible year that the War in Heaven spilled over onto the Earth. The year of the Leviathan. And the final year: the moment when he had fought to seal the Gates of Hell, and succeeded.

“Dean died in that church,” Sam said. “I was going to go through with the ritual—was going to slam the Gates of Hell and die in the process, just like I wanted—and then Dean got in the way. Gave his soul to Death in exchange for my life.”

There was silence in the auditorium.

Sam looked around at them all. “And that brings us to you.” He paced around the edge of the theater. “You are the next generation. There are no demons anymore—maybe not ever again, God willing—but the world is still yours. You have it to protect, to have, to maintain. What we did eighteen years ago, before some of you were even born, we did for you so that your world would be better than ours ever was.”

He paused and steeled himself. “Are there any questions?”

Slowly, a few hands fluttered into the air. He called on a few—an older man, a woman about his age, a few young men—all with fairly easy questions. Then he called on a young woman with a bright, earnest face.

“What happened to Castiel?” she asked, voice ringing through the theater. “Why isn’t he here?”

“I haven’t seen him since the Gates were shut,” Sam said slowly. “Maybe once—God knows I want to see him, so I might have been imagining things—but he hasn’t been here. Otherwise I’d have dragged his ass down here and made him talk to you too.”

Laughter. That was good. Sam thought that maybe it was going to be all right. But then the girl asked, “So where did he go?”

Sam’s heart dropped. “I wish I knew,” he said.


	11. Chapter 11

With the classes on a regular schedule at the bunker, a few new faces moved in as a result of actually seeing how the bunker worked. Tara Hayward—with her bad knee and worse attitude—was the only permanent one. But a rotating crew of young people whose names Sam never quite caught began taking up residence on occasion, spending time with the vast resources available at the bunker.

Krissy took to spending more time with him, and encouraging the kids to spend time with him too. Now they were six. Lee and Dean were the sweetest kids ever, Sam thought, and they regarded him as a part of the family. When Krissy went away on hunts (as she frequently did) she left the children under Sam’s explicit care.

That was good, because Sam had begun to notice that many of the hunters—even those he’d known for a long time—regarded him with an unsettling kind of awe. They listened when he spoke, treated him with bizarre respect, asked his advice on things spooky and mundane alike. 

One night over a game of poker, Sam mentioned it to Irv. “I don’t get it,” he said, swapping out two cards. “It’s like I’m an adult or something…”

“If you didn’t miss it, boy, you are,” Irv said. The old hunter was nearly blind and wheelchair-bound, but his mind was as sharp as ever. “You were the best, once, and when you’re the best it never really goes away.”

“I don’t like it,” Sam muttered.

Irv dropped a few chips into the center of the table. “No one ever likes it. But you learn and you take care of them however you can.”

Sam considered his cards and what, exactly, he was supposed to bet on this awful hand. “It doesn’t feel like I’m doing enough.”

“You’re doing more than enough,” Irv snapped. “Your brother would be proud of you. Hell, I’m proud of you. Wish I’d had the guts to do what you’re doing.”

“Thanks, Irv,” Sam said. He hesitated for a moment, contemplating his cards, then said, “Call.”

Irv slapped down his cards with a grin. “I win.”

Sam groaned and dropped his cards. “How!?”

“Luck of the draw, boy. I’ll see you in the morning.”

As a matter of fact, Sam didn’t see Irv in the morning. Sometime in the night the old hunter passed away peacefully. Sam got the sense that people would miss Irv, but everyone knew that it was his time. Sam felt like it was how Irv would have wanted to go: absolutely destroying Sam at poker and passing his last advice on to someone else.

They built a pyre and gave him a proper send-off. There was a wake, and it was perfectly lovely, but Sam had the distinct sense the whole time that everyone was hesitant to approach him. Crowley stuck by his side with doggedness and awkward concern that put everyone else to shame, and it was nice, but sort of terrifying.

“Look, what’s going on?” Sam asked the day after the funeral, when he and Crowley were alone in the greenhouse together. 

“We’re worried, Moose,” Crowley said. 

Sam sighed heavily. “About me?”

Crowley nodded. “Of course. You’re an odd duck. You and me…we’re the last of the old guard, you know that?” He pinched a dead flower off its bush.

“Yes.” Sam turned and picked up a pair of scissors. Kevin and Tamara needed a few hex bags for a potential witch hunt up in Seattle. The rosemary plant was about to get an abrupt shearing. “Don’t worry about me, though. You and me, we’ve got friends. It’ll be fine.”

Much later, though, Sam went out alone and sat and watched the cars going by on the highway near the bunker. “Can you hear me, Cas?” he asked into the wind. “I’m still waiting. It’s just me and Crowley now, and you know he doesn’t count. You were there too. Where are you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE
> 
> MORE
> 
> CHAPTER


	12. Chapter 12

It was twenty years to the day and no one celebrated. 

No one mourned, either. There were no classes that day, and a movie was premiering, and Dean and Lee had a playdate in town, and others were away on hunts or their other jobs. Missouri called that morning to chat with Sam a minute, and Crowley looked odd and out of sorts, but that was it. 

Sam felt weird.

He went out—as he did every year on the anniversary of Dean’s death—to stand by his brother’s grave for a minute and talk. He hoped that Dean was happy, wherever he was, or at least at peace. It would be for the best.

After dinner, when those left in the bunker went their separate ways, Sam went down to the library. He took out some books to research the problems of vengeful Mayan gods for Garth, but couldn’t concentrate. 

Finally he set down the books. He closed the door and, standing, leaned against the table. His hands were shaking. “Where are you, Cas?” Sam didn’t raise his head, but glared at the tabletop. “I know you’re out there. I know you’re still around. I know you’re listening. Damn it, where are you!? I’m alone here, everyone else is gone…”

He gripped the edge of the table so tightly that his hands turned white. “I need you!” he shouted into the empty silence of the library.

There was a flutter of wings and the taste of ozone on Sam’s tongue. He didn’t dare turn around, but his spine tingled with the sense of someone familiar there.

“I am here, Sam.” 

Sam looked up at the ceiling, pressing his hands into the table. He couldn’t make himself look behind him. “Cas?”

“Yes.”

“Where have you been?”

There was the sound of footsteps. “I have been out in the world. I have let my light shine before others that they might give glory to my Father in Heaven. I have observed wonders that cannot be fathomed and miracles that cannot be counted. I have borne witness by these signs and wonders and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed by His will. I have gone to hear the earth and the sea and the sky praise God with their motion. I have watched children grow to men and men grow to children again. I have seen innocence and evil and all the things of the world. And I have been in Heaven, where I have knelt before the throne of God and asked him to bless and keep this world, that you might be saved from your agonies. I have been by your side in spirit if not in body. Be comforted. I was always with you.”

Sam turned around then. “I never saw you,” he said, and stared at the unchanged angel. Castiel still looked young, a man in his mid-thirties with dark hair and sharp blue eyes. “I never spoke to you, I only got hints that you were even there.”

Castiel stared back. There was a tremor, Sam noticed, in his face. “I was there. Know I will not leave you, but you must cease praying to me.”

“I’m not going to stop praying until you stay where I can see you!” Sam reached out and grabbed the angel by the shoulders. “I won’t stop until you stay where I can hear you and touch you and know that you’re there! Didn’t you hear me!? I need you, Cas!”

The other stepped back, hands raised defensively. “You must stop praying to me! I cannot come to you, Sam! I can’t—I can’t—” He stopped and looked away. His words, when they came, were quiet and defeated. “Why didn’t you ever stop praying?”

“Because I wanted you to come home,” Sam said. He didn’t crowd Cas. He just stood there, hands on the angel’s shoulders, willing him to understand. “We’re it. We’re the last. We know, we saw everything happen. Without you…I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m still here.” He stopped and let the angel think on it.

“I couldn’t come back,” Cas said in a small voice.

“Why not?” Sam asked softly.

Cas looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed and pained. “I couldn’t come back because every time I tried I thought about Dean and it hurt so much, Sam, I didn’t know how to fight it or how to help you when I was hurting so. I can’t stay. It still hurts. I’m sorry.” He shivered. (Sam imagined feathers ruffling and prickling.) “I’m sorry.”

“You can stay,” Sam said desperately, “and we can hurt together. I’d rather do that than be alone. I’d rather you be with me than be alone.”

The angel stood there frozen, watching Sam with his hands in fists at his sides. “Is this what it feels like to be human?” he asked after a moment. “I don’t know how you survive the pain…”

“We survive together,” Sam said gently. “That’s how I did it. Stay, Cas. We can do it together.”

Cas stepped forward swiftly. Narrow arms wrapped around Sam’s shoulders and his own arms were suddenly full of angel and trenchcoat. Sam accepted the hug, rubbing the angel’s shoulders. Cas was shaking with silent cries. There was a damp spot on Sam’s shoulder.

“Why do you want me to stay?” Cas said, voice muffled by Sam’s flannel shirt.

“We’re family.” Sam tightened his hold on Cas. The angel wasn’t leaving this time. “And family doesn’t go anywhere, even when things are bad.”

Sam felt the motion of a nod next to his shoulder. “I’ll stay,” Castiel whispered, voice so soft he almost couldn’t be heard.

At that, Sam dropped his head to rest it on Castiel’s shoulder. “Welcome home, Castiel,” Sam said. “Welcome home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...that's a wrap. Thanks for sticking with it, everyone. :)


End file.
